Patient Portals are becoming a part of the ecosystem of care. Many policymakers and health advocates believe increased use of patient portals will empower patients to engage in better management of their care, and this will result in healthier populations and lower costs. Despite the interest in and proliferation of ambulatory patient portals, little is known about what motivates patients to adopt and continue to use portals, and what functionalities patients consider important for self-management of conditions. At the same time, research on patient engagement through health information technology (HIT) in the inpatient setting has only included small-scale qualitative case studies examining limited technological parameters such as access to medication records or care team information. In 2013, Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (OSUWMC) was the first academic medical center in the United States to experiment with wide-scale deployment of inpatient portals through the MyChart Bedside tablet-based application. Our proposed three-arm study is focused on evaluating Usability, Use and Experience with MyChart Bedside to gain a greater understanding of the process, content and context in which this tool is embedded and continues to evolve. Our intent in this Portals in Inpatient Care (PIC) study is to explore how the tool affects use, how use shapes the experience, and why individuals have varied experiences. In addition, we will develop a logic model framing our understanding of the dynamics that inpatient portals create within the hospital care environment to facilitate future research studies as well a inform the efforts of other health systems.